Firefox drops support for Windows XP in 2017

Software companies have been moving away from Windows XP for years now. The latest example is Mozilla, which just announced that its Firefox browser won’t support Windows XP starting from version 53. Additionally, Mozilla will discontinue support for Windows Vista as well.

Mozilla Firefox 53 is scheduled to be released in March 2017 but users won’t be able to install in on Windows XP and Vista. If you’re still on Windows XP and Firefox is your main browser, you have two options: stick to Mozilla 52 or change your browser.

The good news for Mozilla Firefox users on Windows XP is that as soon as Mozilla 53 is released, the previous version is going to be moved to the ESR (Extended Support Release) branch, meaning Mozilla will still provide updates for Firefox 52 until mid-2018.

We plan to eol XP/Vista by first moving those users out to ESR 52. Once 52 merges to aurora, we should land changes to the stand alone installer to prevent install by XP and Vista users. Initially there shouldn’t be an issue with running but eventually we’ll import a system dependency that will break browser startup.

However, these updates will mainly be security patches without any new features and improvements. After that, Mozilla on Windows XP will be completely unsupported and insecure to use. But that won’t be a problem since everyone will most likely switch to a newer version of Windows by then.

Mozilla Firefox is currently the only major browser that still supports Windows XP. Chrome and Opera have already left the building earlier this year.